Kurdish Migrants Trapped in Deadly Border Zone // FAI ONLINE

Migrant children congregate near the Belarusian-Polish border, as Polish soldiers look on from the other side (via @RuwaydaMustafah on Twitter).

Thousands of Iraqi migrants, including an estimated 8,000 from the Kurdistan Region, are trapped on the border between Belarus and Poland, victims of an intensifying showdown in Eastern Europe between the European Union and Russia-aligned Belarus. At least one 14-year-old Kurdish child and seven other citizens of Kurdistan have died from exposure in the last week, as temperatures continue to drop ahead of the winter season, signaling a life-and-death crisis for those migrants who cannot continue into Poland or Lithuania, but also cannot return to Belarus.

Many Kurdish migrants described receiving aid from the Belarusian government in the form of wire cutters, axes and directions to unofficial border crossings into Poland and the Baltic states, as Poland and the EU accused Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukeshanko of using the Mideast migrant crisis as a means of retaliating against the European Union for sanctions against his regime. The highly-controversial 2020 presidential contest which re-elected Lukeshanko was followed by weeks of popular demonstrations, drawing crowds of hundreds of thousands in Minsk and across the small nation. Considered the last dictatorship in Europe, the Belarusian regime brutally repressed the largely-peaceful demonstrations with systematic arrests and imprisonments, drawing the aforementioned sanctions from the Council of Europe.

Beginning in August of this year, the Belarusian government relaxed it’s visa policies, making it a desirable conduit into Europe for desperate refugees and migrants in places like Syria, Iraq and Yemen. A dramatic influx of migratory travel through Belarus began in September, coming to a head this week at the Kuznica border crossing near Grodno in north-west Belarus. Thousands of migrants, mostly under the age of 40, attempted to cross into Poland with aid from Belarusian security forces, while Polish forces massed along their side of the frontier, denying them entry. The migrants received non-reentry visas from the Belarusian government, leaving them trapped in a diplomatic no-man’s-land between two countries who will not process them. The deaths of several migrants this week due to frigid temperatures, including a teenage boy, portend an impending humanitarian disaster. The EU and UN Security Council have both taken up the issue in recent hearings.

As always, we ask the global Maranatha family to join us in urgent intercession on behalf of the trapped migrants, who are suffering as pawns of a broader, geo-political struggle between Western nations and Russia, the primary patron of Belarus. Millions of people from the Middle East, mostly young individuals and families, have fled their home nations in the last decade, including almost 200,000 from the Kurdistan region of Iraq since 2018. Citing war, political instability, and the lack of economic opportunity as reasons for making the dangerous journey, they are targets of human traffickers and corrupt politicians across the Middle East and Europe. We pray that the King of Kings would move world leaders to resolve the Polish-Belarusian border crisis quickly and provide an avenue of passage to safety for the crowds facing starvation, disease and exposure. We pray that the Wisdom of God would grant Arab and Kurdish leaders wisdom in shepherding their people and providing them with political and economic stability. And most of all, we pray that the Lord of the Harvest would send laborers into Kurdish, Arab and Turkish fields, to partner with them in bringing relief from hardship, and to proclaim Good News of Great Joy.

Maranatha